1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image printing machine which is arranged to print information on print paper of an image (character, symbol, drawing, etc.) read from a newspaper, magazine, textbook or reference book, etc. by the use of an image scanner, whereby unnecessary image information read by the image scanner is deleted so as not to be printed.
Moreover, the present invention further relates to an image printing machine of the type described above which is so arranged that the printing position on the print paper where the image information is printed is changed corresponding to the number of times of image reading by the image scanner. For example, when a wordbook is read, an English word is printed at the left side of the print paper, while its Japanese translation is printed at the right side of the paper. Or, in reading a price list, it is possible according to the image printing machine of the present invention that a model name is printed at the left side of the paper, with its corresponding price being printed at the right side of the paper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a conventional image reading and printing machine, the read-out image information is printed on the printing paper from the start point which is positioned at one side of the printing paper, and the image information exceeding one line is printed again from the start point of a next line on the paper. Accordingly, the start point has always been at the same position in each line according to the conventional image reading and printing machine.
Therefore, it has been difficult to print the image information in a distinguishing manner on the paper to make a pair, for example, a word and its translated word, or a model name and its price, resulting in a hard-to-see, poor appearance of the printed image information.
As shown in FIG. 8, the image scanner referred to above is in the shape of a pen, which has a reader part 7 provided at the bottom surface thereof. The reader part 7 will be in contact with the paper for reading the image on the paper. A pitch sensor 8 of a rotary encoder type which rotates when the image scanner moves on the paper is also provided for measuring the amount the scanner move. In this case, the reader part 7 has a length a of 8 mm, and the bottom of the image scanner has a length b of 26 mm and a width c of 17 mm.
When an operator of the machine reads a desired image by the use of the image scanner, the image (for example, a character) which is being traced by the image scanner is not the image that the operator looks at. There is a difference between the image being traced at the image scanner and that being looked at by the operator.
As a result, when reading is finished, an unnecessary image, in addition to the desired image, is inevitably read out. By way of one example, in the case where an image shown in FIG. 9 is described on the paper, and only "A" to "O" should be read out, the bottom surface of the image scanner is pressed into contact with the paper, and then the image scanner is moved in a direction shown by an arrow in FIG. 10. The position of the image scanner when image reading is started, when image reading is being carried out and when image reading is completed is respectively shown in FIG. 11, FIG. 12 and FIG. 13.
As is clear from FIGS. 11-13, even if the image scanner is stopped as soon as the operator looks at the character "O", the image scanner has actually already read out the character "P". Therefore, when the read-out image information is printed as it is, the characters "A" to "P" are undesirably printed.